Evaluation of impulse response-based BIST techniques for MEMS in the presence of weak nonlinearities

Microsystems are usually affected by multiple failure sources. A faulty behavior caused by different types of defects and failure sources can exhibit small functional errors that are difficult to detect using structural testing. From here stems the necessity to apply specification-based functional testing on the basis of a method that carries enough information about the physical behavior of the device under test (DUT). Such a method can be attained by the impulse response (IR) measurement of the linear DUT. In this paper we explain three existing techniques to measure the IR of linear time-invariant (LTI) devices. Weak nonlinearities that can be caused by system nonidealities and measurement distortions are considered. Only simple techniques that do not require the presence of a digital signal processor (DSP) on-chip are considered. A detailed comparison between these techniques is carried out to demonstrate our choice for a BIST (built-in self-test) approach.